The Nature of Stalin's Dictatorship: The Politburo, 1924-1953 (review)

Arfon Rees's edited volume on the Politburo under Iosif Stalin is a typically useful product of the now decades-old Birmingham project on Soviet industrialization founded by R. W. Davies. The Birmingham project has focused on Soviet political economy during the Stalin era, and its methodology has been and remains empirical and statistical, with a pronounced aversion to overgeneralization. This volume contains three essays on the Politburo (by Rees, Evan Mawdsley, and Stephen Wheatcroft), three topical essays on the economy (by Davies, Melanie Ilic, and Oleg Khlevniuk), foreign policy (Derek Watson), and Ukraine (Valery Vasil'ev), and a final essay on Stalin as a leader (by Rees).

The book can best be read by skimming the thirty-two excellent statistical tables, dipping into the accompanying text where necessary. I am being neither snide nor belittling. Good tables are the result of careful thought and considerable labor. Their disappearance from academic history books is the pernicious consequence of, among other factors, the "cultural turn," authorial laziness, and the foolish policies of prestigious academic presses. This book's tables are based on the major extant documentary sources on the Politburo and Stalinist decision-making: the agendas and protocols of the Politburo, autobiographical data on Politburo members, the logbook of visitors to Stalin's office, and Stalin's extensive correspondence with Lazar Kaganovich when the former was on long working vacations in the south. (A further valuable source that needs to be tamed are the thousands of contemporary and memoir accounts of meetings in Stalin's office and at the Politburo that lie scattered in various archives and in published books—a worthy future project for the Birmingham group!)

These thirty-two tables and the accompanying text convey well to the non-specialist reader the basic facts concerning the Stalinist Politburo that have emerged in the last fifteen years: that the Politburo was never the prime locale for collective decision-making; that by 1937 it had practically ceased to exist; that Stalin always had an inner circle on whom he relied and that this circle was smaller than the formal Politburo and often contained non-Politburo members (hence the importance of knowing who was in Stalin's office when and with whom); that this elite group maintained a considerable continuity; that Stalin, far from being a weak leader, had firm dictatorial control by at least 1932; that no principled factions existed within the Soviet elite in the 1930s; that any factions that may have emerged in the post-1945 period have not yet been securely identified with distinct policy positions; and that it was accepted for leading elites to represent their bureaucracies' interests in policy discussions (especially on economic issues) so long as they unquestioningly accepted Stalin's final decisions. The tables provide further valuable information showing which individuals were influential at what times, and the particular issues to which Stalin was devoting his attention.

The best essay in any collection on Soviet politics is typically the one written by Oleg Khlevniuk, especially when, as here, it is coauthored with R. W. Davies as part of their long and profitable collaboration. Khlevniuk and Davies, joined by Melanie Ilic, attempt to answer perhaps the hardest question in Soviet elite politics: How were policy decisions made under Stalin? In the introduction to the volume, Rees states that "we now know almost as much about the internal workings of the leadership under Stalin as we do of any major leader in a Western liberal state" (p. 13). This is a preposterous statement, as Khlevniuk and Davies, who together know considerably more than any other living soul about Stalinist economic policymaking, show in their study of four key economic decisions from 1932 to 1936. They reveal that the abrupt (and temporary) shift toward economic moderation in the spring of 1932 followed Stalin's receipt and heavy annotation of reports on urban unrest. They also show that decisions to scale back investment rates and to end bread rationing...